Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society

The RCC's founding directors are Christof Mauch of LMU Munich and Helmuth Trischler of the Deutsches Museum. In 2023, an new LMU Chair of Environmental Humanities, Sonja Dümpelmann, joined the center. Following Christof Mauch's retirement in July 2026, the RCC entered a phase of transition with two new interim directors, Julia Pongratz and Ralf Ludwig.

The Rachel Carson Center facilitates research on the interaction between human agents and nature. Its goal is to strengthen the role of the humanities in current political and scientific debates about the environment. While the center is located in Munich, Germany, its working language is English and the RCC's staff and fellows come from all over the world. After the program's launch in 2022, the center hosted a rotating group of nine international Landhaus fellows, who lived at the RCC Landhaus at Hermannsdorfer Landwerkstätten during their fellowship. The Landhaus fellowship program ended in summer 2025. This was followed by an Alumni fellowship program in 2026 that brought six alumni fellows back to the RCC. Besides the funded fellowship program, the RCC hosts a number of postgraduate programs. This includes the structured Doctoral Program Environment and Society (ProEnviron), the Master of Arts Environment and Society, a certificate program for Master students in Environmental Studies, and the International Doctorate Program Rethinking Environment (IDK), which is organized in cooperation with the Environmental Science Center at the University of Augsburg. To share and discuss the work of its researchers and visitors, the RCC hosts a series of public colloquia, conferences, and workshops. The center’s outreach program also includes the development of exhibitions in collaboration with the Deutsches Museum. The RCC has tight connections to its partner institutions all across the world, including Madison, Pécs, Beijing, Tallinn, Venice, Vienna, and Zurich.